Due to health reasons, Greek soprano Alexia Voulgaridou has withdrawn from singing the role of Cio-Cio-San in the performances of Madama Butterfly on Monday 6 April and Saturday 11 April 2015. The role will now be sung by Puerto Rican soprano Ana María Martínez.

In addition to this, due to unforeseen circumstances, American tenor Noah Stewart has had to withdraw from singing the role of Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton. American tenor Brian Jagde will now sing the role on 6 and 11 April. He will also sing the role of Lieutenant B.F Pinkerton for The Royal Opera on 31 March, 4 April and 9 April.

Ana María Martínez made her Royal Opera debut as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni in 2002 and has since returned to sing the roles of Violetta Valéry in La traviata and Alice Ford in Falstaff. She makes her Royal Opera role debut as Cio-Cio-San with the Company, having previously sung the role in Washington, Houston, Vienna and Munich. Other recent engagements include Mimì in La bohème for Paris Opéra and Dallas Opera; Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, Desdemona in Otello and the title role of Rusalka for Lyric Opera of Chicago and Carmen for Santa Fe Opera and Houston Grand Opera.

Brian Jagde made his Royal Opera debut singing Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton in previous performances of this revival. He has previously sung this role for San Francisco Opera, while part of their Adler Fellowship Program. His recent appearances include Don José in Carmen in Portland, Oregon; Count Elemer in Arabella for the Metropolitan Opera, New York; and Cavaradossi in Tosca for San Francisco Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago.

The nightscape of Mahagonny is a place of shady transactions – of bars and brothels and brawling, illuminated by the half-light glow of the moon. In Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, whiskey takes a special role in the vicious cycle of consumption and debt. It precipitates the point at which it all goes sour. When it is revealed that the unpaid bill for a round of whiskies, bought in celebration and fraternity, can never be repaid, the rise definitively turns into the fall.

In popular song, the making and drinking of whiskey is fused with the secretive atmosphere of moonlight. It also reflects slippery conceptions of American freedom. Copper Kettle, as sung by, among others, Joan Baez in 1962 and by Bob Dylan in 1970, is a paean to sticking it to the man:

My Daddy he made whisky
My Granddaddy he did too
We ain’t paid no whisky tax since 1792

The so-called whiskey tax (although it applied to all distilled spirits) was introduced in 1791 by the fledgling federal government. The first tax to be placed on any domestic product, it was intended as a means to pay back the national debt incurred during the Revolutionary War. Farmsteads in the Deep South had long been used to distilling their surplus grain into whisky – drinking themselves silly and using it in barter exchange: the cottage industry par excellence – and the tax was met with a deep hostility.

The ensuing Whiskey Rebellion lasted for nearly a decade in various, often deadly clashes with the police. One can draw a line from here through to Prohibition, of underground production of liquor and the birth of the moonshiner. Homespun stills for making hooch were botched together from improbable junctions of copper piping and storage urns housed in barns, sheds, or indeed anywhere the highly combustible machine might not cause too much damage.

In Copper Kettle there is no appeal for action. The moonshiner is a kind of anti-hero and his passive resistance a way of life.

You’ll just lay there by the juniper
While the moon is bright
Watch them jugs a-filling
In the pale moonlight

Brecht and Weill’s most famous export, the song variously known as ‘The Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)’ and ‘Moon Over Alabama’, has been contorted and repurposed by artists from The Doors and David Bowie to Nina Simone. We must show them the way to the next whisky bar, and not ask why. Brecht, in his bitter irony, shows drinking as part of the condition of living and working under capitalism. It becomes a necessary way of coping when one must work at the limits of exhaustion in order to survive. When we are caught in a double-bind, debt is unavoidable, or even natural.

Under that particular soft, dim moonlight, moonshine offers blueprints to reread and contest the failing mores and codes of the places we live in. And as sure as night turns to day, tax and debt (in Mahagonny and beyond) are the core motors of the plot.

The production is given with generous philanthropic support from the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, Stefan Sten Olsson, Richard and Ginny Salter, Hamish and Sophie Forsyth and The Royal Opera Circle.

Mahagonny, a city founded by three criminals, is a magnet for the destitute and disenchanted. A hotbed of debauchery and hedonism, the city thrives on pleasure. When four migrants try to escape, they find that leaving is much harder than they had ever thought...

Brecht and Weill’s score is brilliantly inventive, offering the listener a dizzying array of musical styles, from the popular songs of the 1920s and the tradition of the music hall, to film music. The score is composed of lots of individual numbers, and before the premiere in 1930, Weill was convinced to make several edits in order to soften the aggressive tone and he reluctantly cut one of his favourite songs - The Mandalay Song. Find out more about The Mandalay Song.

‘You’re a Turk… you’ve a hundred women around you: you buy them and you sell them when your passion dies’ – so says Fiorilla to her new suitor Selim in Rossini’s Il turco in Italia. But despite painting all Selim’s countrymen with a rather broad (and to modern audiences, uncomfortable) brush, Fiorilla is irresistibly captivated by his exotic allure. Like many an operatic character – and indeed like many an opera or ballet – she can’t resist the charms of the East.

Il turco in Italia, first performed in 1814, built on the then-current vogue for Turquerie. A few years earlier Mozart enjoyed tremendous success with his 1782 Singspiel Die Entführung aus dem Serail, set in the palace of a Turkish ruler. There was a lot of other successful ‘Turkish’ music from the period, including various instrumental works by both Haydn and Mozart. There were even some fortepianos built with a ‘Turkish’ stop, which could add exotic bells and cymbals to the sound.

In the 19th century the focus often shifted further east. Petipa’s 1877 ballet La Bayadère is set in India and tells the story of a temple dancer. Petipa incorporated some references to traditional Indian dance – although the fact that he was able to draw on the choreography he had recently completed for Verdi’s Egyptian opera Aida suggests that La Bayadère’s exotic elements were not all carefully attuned to India.

Orient-inspired operas were particularly fashionable in mid-to-late 19th-century France: Bizet’s Sri Lanka-set Les Pêcheurs de perles and Egyptian Djamileh; Massenet’s Thaïs, set in Egypt’s Byzantine rule. Saint-Saëns’ La Princesse jaune has a plot that epitomizes the fashion for exotic Orientalism: Kornélis is obsessed with everything Japanese and falls in love with a painting of ‘Ming’, a Japanese girl. After taking some opium, he fantasizes about a trip to Japan – but, when he awakes, he realizes that he loves his Dutch cousin. The lightly pentatonic score, just like the plot, flirts with Japanese themes but is firmly rooted in the West.

Moving into the 20th century, Puccini’s 1904 opera Madama Butterfly is also an expression of the contemporary fashion for exotic Oriental settings. But Puccini and his librettists Illica and Giacosa are subtle in how they explore the dialogue between East and West. Much of the music has a ‘Japanese’ style, with pentatonic melodies and percussion including glockenspiel and gong – but this is in opposition to the stridently Western style of the Americans’ music. These two styles are carefully intermingled and contrasted over the course of the opera – although the grim conclusion is set to thoroughly un-Western-style music, flying in the face of Western harmonic convention. Butterfly is no mere exotic trinket: she is carefully fleshed out, and her tragedy mirrors the complexity of real-life cultural exchange.

As horizons broadened through the 20th century, the novelty of an Oriental setting decreased. Operas and ballets could, after all, be set absolutely anywhere – Siberia, the moon, ‘above the clouds’ – and musical style became more malleable as well. In Szymanowski’s Król Roger, for instance, the sensual ‘Oriental’ music of the Shepherd is contrasted with music drawing on Greek and Byzantine traditions, creating a mixture of styles which goes beyond the conventional East–West divide. Meanwhile, MacMillan’s Song of the Earth makes subtle reference to the Chinese origins of the text of Mahler’s music through gestures as fleeting as flexed wrists and ankles.

More recently, operas by composers including Tan Dun and Toshio Hosokawa have been set in China, Japan and elsewhere – but giving a very different perspective from that of Saint-Saëns or Puccini. And Akram Kham and Shobana Jeyasingh are among the choreographers who have created work that combines Western styles with a thorough grounding in traditional South Asian dance. Times may have changed, but there is still something fascinating about how cultures interact.

Former Jette Parker Young Artists and an array of Company-affiliated artists have been shortlisted as finalists for the International Opera Awards 2015. The awards, which are now in their third year, celebrate and promote excellence in opera by honouring the achievements of performers, producers and backstage teams. The winners will be announced at a gala dinner on 26 April 2015.

Few contemporary composers have so successfully explored the breadth of the human voice as Jonathan Dove. With 28 operas under his belt, he’s one of Britain’s most prolific melodists, and his work has been performed on five continents. Soon, London audiences will once again have a chance to hear his lyrical music, as the Royal Opera House stages a new production of Swanhunter, a family opera about ‘the power of song’.

Written in 2009 with young audiences in mind, it’s based on a Finnish folk epic that also inspired a tone poem by Jean Sibelius telling of the adventures of Lemminkäinen who defies his mother’s wishes and travels to the north in search of a bride. In the icy landscape he encounters, he must face challenging tasks including shooting a swan, ‘in order to get the most beautiful girl he can imagine’, Dove says. But the hero ‘ends up dead, hacked up and flung into the river’, before his body is recovered by his mother and brought back to life ‘through song’.

The composer explains he wanted his music to appeal to young audiences in particular, showcasing ‘the extraordinary thing that singing is’ and the range of possibilities that the human voice can offer through a score that calls for six singers. The mother’s song has ‘magical powers’, as does Lemminkäinen’s when he sings dogs to sleep, for example, so both parts ‘involve quite a lot of intensity’. On the other hand, Death is sung by a bass, and the Swan by a soprano with a ‘series of phrases that start on a top D and then go up even higher, kind of like floating down over the [sound of] ripples of water that the harp makes’.

Designed for small theatre spaces, the opera is written for a chamber orchestra. There are only six instruments, partly chosen for their ‘folk colour, because it’s a folk story’. The accordion and the fiddle call to mind traditional dance music, for example. ‘It’s fun for an opera to sound as if it has come from the outside world’. Additional instruments include percussion, the horn, the harp and the double bass.

Dove says he doesn’t compose too differently when writing for a family audience and that he ultimately just writes ‘what I would like to see and hear’. The story of Swanhunter certainly evokes vivid images that blend well to music. Like his earlier family opera, The Adventures of Pinocchio, Lemminkäinen’s tale also ‘responds well to music and singing’, especially as there’s magic involved. ‘Operas are an amazing way of telling stories’, he concludes. Add Nordic myth, magic spells and supernatural powers, and you have a recipe that ticks all the boxes.

Despite the fact that musicals and opera share the same dramatic roots, many fans of the former have never taken the plunge with the latter. It may be that they feel opera isn't for them, or that they don't know where to begin with an art form with four hundred years of history.

Anne Marie Gibbons was a Company Principal at English National Opera 2004–7, where roles included Dorabella in Cosi fan tutte, Flora in La traviata, Ino in Semele, Nero in Agrippina and Annio in La clemenza di Tito. She has sung under conductors including Edward Gardner, Mark Wigglesworth, David Parry, Daniel Reuss, Jonathan Darlington, Laurence Cummings and Johannes Debus.

During the relay, which will be screened in more than 1500 cinemas across over 35 countries, Paterson will interview members of the cast and production team. A series of backstage films exploring the creation of the production will also be shown.

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny will be screened live in cinemas across the world on 1 April 2015. Find your nearest cinema. The Season continues on 5 May with a live screening of The Royal Ballet’s La Fille mal gardée.

Madama Butterfly runs 20 March–11 April 2015. Tickets are sold out but returns may become available, and 67 day tickets are released on the morning of each performance.

The production is a co-production with Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona. It is sponsored by Coutts, with generous philanthropic support from Mr and Mrs Christopher W.T. Johnston and The Royal Opera House Endowment Fund.